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When I came out as gay in my sophomore year of college, I absolutely loved going to Tigerheat – a kitschy 18-and-over gay club in Los Angeles. I mostly remember my nights there as frivolous fun, but they also had deeper meaning. That’s where I first learned how to openly and unabashedly celebrate being gay.

Adolescence is a time period when a children’s relationships with their parents can undergo transformations that increase conflict and negative emotion (Laursen & Collins, 2009). To better understand how these conflicts are managed, my colleagues and I analyzed the emotion dynamics—i.e., the patterns of emotional exchange between parents and adolescents—during conflict discussions.

Prosocial behaviors, such as willingness to help others, may be linked to specific personalities. Based on new research published by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, agreeableness is one of the better predictors of prosocial behavior.

A recent podcast from NPR's Invisbilia garnered attention from many current personality psychology researchers. Below is one of the many responses to the creators of the podcast generated on both Facebook and Twitter.

The obvious—and dominant—answer is to explain how the mind works. The statistical methods typically employed by psychologists are set up to answer questions related to cause and effect.

But this is not the only way to approach science—or statistical methodology. In a preprint paper currently under review, researchers Tal Yarkoni and Jacob Westfall suggest that psychologists should shift their emphasis in the direction of prediction.

When it comes to helping patients make the best choices for themselves, sometimes you have to challenge their usual way of dealing with the world, according to new research published by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Diminishing a person’s belief in free will leads to them feeling less like their true selves, according to recent research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. In a pair of studies, researchers from Texas A&M University manipulated people’s beliefs in free will to see how this would affect the subjects’ sense of authenticity, their sense of self.

The first ever meeting of the Society for Improving Psychological Science (SIPS)—even that name is uncertain—was radically different from a typical psychology conference. Attendees didn’t just learn about new research on how the scientific process can be improved, we worked for three days to try to immediately and tangibly improve psychological science.